Rick Cohen, the executive chairman of C&S Wholesale Grocers, spent 15 years quietly creating a robotics company called Symbotic that recently signed Walmart as its biggest customer and announced plans to go public in a merger with a Softbank-based special purpose acquisition company. Symbotic's robots will operate in 25 of Walmart's distribution centers, and the company's other retail partners include C&S, Albertsons and Target.

Hy-Vee has named Jeremy Gosch as its next president and sole chief operating officer, while former Chief Accounting Officer Andy Schreiner has become chief financial officer and treasurer. Aaron Wiese, who was co-chief operating officer with Gosch, has become board vice chairman.

Value should be at the center of any company effort to upgrade or install a new enterprise resource planning system, this Boston Consulting Group analysis states. Such a business transformation approach should identify value drivers and use ERP "in a modular, flexible way, so you can keep the core lean yet enhance in just the right places and add new capabilities as needed," the authors write.

B2B companies need sales agility, which involves improving your sales organization's go-to-market readiness and return on investment, plus your selling mindset and your approach to your pipeline, writes Gary Clark, president and co-founder of OneSolution. "Rather than having reps focus on filling the customer pipeline, they can focus more on qualifying leads and elevating customer satisfaction," Clark writes.

Marketing by Modification's Alexa Dagostino outlines five communication best practices for business-to-business marketers. It's crucial for B2B marketers to invest time in nurturing existing clients, as one loss can have a huge impact, Dagostino writes, while also advising communicating regularly with customers and using case studies to prove value.

Military veterans often struggle to reimagine their purpose once they leave active service, but none of us is immune from the need to evolve our purpose as circumstances change, writes John Baldoni, who also interviews former Army pilot Shannon Polson. "Civilians can learn from the importance of purpose that the military has identified and cultivated, and work on their own purpose, as well as helping others find theirs," Polson says.

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In part 3 of this 4-part series, we'll get into the weeds on what AI will look like when implemented into a distributor's sales arsenal. Register here.